


The Wretched and the Meek

by altairattorney



Category: Twin Peaks
Genre: Gen, Season 3, Season 3 post-ending spoilers, TPTR
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-01-30
Updated: 2018-01-30
Packaged: 2019-03-11 16:12:11
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,201
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13527876
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/altairattorney/pseuds/altairattorney
Summary: Dale Cooper drives a car in a desert.





	The Wretched and the Meek

**Author's Note:**

> I dreamed about you, baby/ it was just the other night  
> Most of you was naked/ ah, but some of you was light  
> The sands of time were falling/ from your fingers and your thumb  
> And you were waiting for the miracle/ for the miracle to come
> 
> \- Leonard Cohen, Waiting for the Miracle

Dale Cooper drives a car in a desert.

It echoes. The cracks in the universe respond. Wherever they command, a road wounds the nothingness, and he becomes the blood.

Dale Cooper drives, but also not. Something along the lines of, he studies the act of driving. The inflections are in the fabric and the build of all things, and his own is to watch. Mostly decay – he notices that before all, always that.

This one has a worn steering wheel and chipped varnish. As usual, the rear mirror is cracked. As long as it’s good to go somewhere, he is fine with that.

Dale Cooper drives a car in a desert. She sleeps. There is a small tear in the leather near her face, and if she breathes stronger, it flashes white. Dale Cooper feels the force that quivers in the padding, and lets her rest to quiet his unease.

It takes nothing to knock over the highway. A fragile thing, even some padding. Not enough care makes the road slips in a crack, to start over anew – next car, next highway, next cracked mirror.

It isn’t like he has no idea. After a time, awareness came along. But there is no going somewhere without building a map – that he took hers, he knows, he knows.

Another breath, another cigarette she does not smoke.

That’s because. Well. In some vague times, she changes. She has red hair and smoke and is another woman. Is she a woman then, he has no idea. But those are bolts of lightning, the black points in the cracks. Short and terrifying.

Those are small lies. The reality of her is total, eternal, and has the weight of guilt.

Dale Cooper drives a car in a desert. She leads the way, in the soft fluttering of her dreaming eyelashes. The images in her mind rebuild the road mile after mile.

A wind with no direction, he never questions anything.

Until he finds his own, even when she sleeps, he goes where she tells him to.

* * *

They stop for gas in a station that smells like old, dusty things.

He felt a sea breeze, maybe wished it into existence. Silent disappointment in the brakes of his car. She ran out of words at 1 AM, and follows him without a sound.

After he is done, her eyes truly open. When they command the path, he knows better than to argue. She gestures to follow her inside, and as he walks, he studies.

Dirty convenience store. Low lights, oily handle, rotting supplies – just what he does not like, and he would pace back, to drive away in the night.

He doesn’t – not when she is like that. It would resemble his betrayal, again.

Like it often happens, the inside of the building reveals he is wrong. A dingy motel on the West Coast. Sea breeze from the open windows. She found the door, and now the three of them sit.

Dale Cooper observes, from the only chair room 513 offers. Crammed in a corner, his eyes study the women, the lamp, the bed. Old color schemes. The aftertaste of cheap coffee, from the thermos he had three highways earlier, makes it all a sinister omen.

The woman like Diane sits by the woman like Carrie. The mirrors they are almost touch at the fingers. Three polish tones on the right, transparent light on the left, is what he sees. He pays attention, and reads the message in them; they won’t hold hands again.

The woman like Diane is a ghost, and if he looks at the end of her eyes he sees a hue he remembers from his waking hours. A black almost ice; like coffee, or onyx, or mush, or the similar things he listed from childhood in the notebook without a corner. He has seen the black in the mirror once, the point of no return. This woman must be him – like him? – like the world, broken and ground to the point of dust.

The woman like Carrie is a solid in space. Her dress is what catches the attention of his memory. It has the black of charcoal burnt too long, way beyond the right of a fire to burn; and that she is not like Carrie, not anymore, again, is the missing button in his pristine shirt. She rests her finger at the middle of her chest, a silver necklace, and her lips are an alchemical formula;

L A U R A

The woman like Diane says no with her face, but the one she stares at is him.

The swing of her hair has fiery reflexes. Their motion connects all he never saw before. Raindrops come together in his memory, a single long tale, for the first time.

He thought, from them on, that Carrie would mean everything. The sights are grand, indeed; mountains on fire, and galloping owls, and suns at the horizon they watched from the car window. But what he truly sees – more than back then – is the ghost town beaten by the wind, where they stopped for the night, and the squeaking of a rusted hook fate left behind there.

Dale Cooper dwells in the ghost town. He realizes, however, that he is not the wind; he is the hook.

The women take off their masks. He knows what they are. A flood of light, a sunrise – the black hole of his dark star, his own – they mingle, in fury, until nothing but grey peace is left.

At long last, Dale Cooper understands.

* * *

_He sees Diane’s laughter, and a cigarette between her lips. He watches some of her days burn in their lush red trap, from afar._

_All is relative, something in young Dale Cooper whispers. To some, a lifetime is a smoke, a person is worth a cigarette butt._

* * *

“What now?”

He blinks outside, barefoot, on the beach. The motel is still there. Consistency, he thinks.

“You know what,” he says, his tongue lead. “You had that. I took that from you.”

Carrie walked out of the building, but Laura walks to him. In all the misery of his newfound knowledge, at least, he sees her for who she truly is.

Hers is also the smile he hasn’t seen in so long.

“You are wrong,” she answers, and he truly understands she was always above everything.

He takes her hands, half-expecting the helpless cold of their long night drives. They are honey, smooth texture, warm glow.

“I am Laura Palmer.”

He watches her departure across a sea on fire. From the horizon, her hand stretches to him in the dawn. An invitation. Guidance.

* * *

 

Dale Cooper drives a car in a desert. 

The engine roars for miles in the open air. A sound of relief across a visible world, like an arrow.

He drives alone. As he should be. No hand lies across from him to take; because, aimless as he is, he knows he will one day get somewhere.

The universe has no echo now. Whatever it took, the cracks are golden. The grammar of the world rearranges itself in his head;

Dale Cooper drives a car in the desert – to find another ocean, and a better shore.

**Author's Note:**

> Took me a while to elaborate on this. My mind is currently a mess, and what better time to write a surrealist pile of mush than this. Title and main inspiration also comes from a Leonard Cohen song, A Thousand Kisses Deep, now Dale Cooper's personal song after TPTR (trust me, listen to it).


End file.
